By Virginia Vimpeny Lewis

Doing mathematics requires reasoning, problemsolving, and communication. Many students believe you either get mathematics or you don’t. They do not appreciate the complexity of doing mathematics because they are not exposed to examples of how experts do it. They also are not given opportunities to wrestle with mathematical problems such as the “division of the stakes” problems that arose in games of chance that sparked the interest of both professional and amateur mathematicians in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

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